This week we were busy with building and documenting the first robots based on the Zumo Robot Chassis PCB.
The chassis is designed to hook up the FRDM-KL25Z board from Freescale. It is using parts from Pololu (chassis, motors, DC-DC converter, line sensor, H-Bridge, encoders):
Zumo Base Board Overview
In this semester course, students (and myself too, of course :-)) are building a Mini Sumo Robot. That robot is using the Freescale FRDM-KL25Z board with an ARM Cortex-M0+ on it. Today I’ll give an introduction to the ARM core to the class, and timing is right: this morning I have found an excellent overview about ARM microcontroller and tools written by Jay Carlson.: Getting Started with ARM Microcontrollers.
In my tutorial “Bits and Pins with Kinetis” I showed how to use the BitIO_LDD approach for Bit I/O access. I do not like this LDD (logical device driver) approach for several reasons:
Luckily, there is a way to hack around this 🙂
Excellent news: I received this week the 40 INTRO Zumo Robot Base/Chassis PCBs, ready to bring the Zumo Robot project based on the FRDM-KL25Z board from Freescale to the next level:
Intro Zumo PCB TopSide
The new semester is approaching fast! And I’m under pressure to get everything lined up and ready. This time, I want the students of the INTRO (Infotronic) course at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts to have some fun with building and programming Mini-Sumo Robots 🙂
No chance to escape!
Rigi Schwinget (Picture: Roman Koch)
Every three years, there is the “Eidgenössisches Schwing- und Älplerfest” in Switzerland. A really big thing for us here. If you are not familiar with what this is, then have a read about the long tradition of Schwingen in Switzerland.
Wondering what “Schwingen” or wrestling has to do with a technology blog? It is about having fun with robots!
Self-Motivation: I write this post in the hope to cut the number of ‘please help me’ emails in my inbox ;-):
If you want to debug one of the Freescale boards with OpenSDA (FRDM-KL25Z, FRDM-K20, FRDM-KL05Z, FRDM-KL46Z48M, FRDM-KL02Z, TWR-KL47Z48M, …), and if you get this dialog …
No Device Available
… then read on.
Ahhhhrg! I admit: I’m not immune to all the silly problems an engineer can face in his life. And sometimes it is about the most basic things. This morning was again such a day: One of the infrared sensors of my Zumo Robot reported wrong values:
Sensor wrong values
As I was so pleased with the FRDM-KL46Z board, that I have ordered the Tower version of it, the TWR-KL46Z48M:
FRDM-KL46Z with TWR-KL46Z48M
What I missed so far was USB support for the KL46Z. So time to have a quick look at board(s) and to add USB support for it.
“A picture says more than 1000 words.”
I don’t know the source of that quote, but for sure it is true for every developer and engineer too. Engineers need to work a lot with numbers. But numbers can be transformed into pictures and graphs which can make complex things and relationships easier to understand. Verifying proper functionality of a PID closed loop controller or watching sensor values with a nice plot is definitely something very useful. Would it not be great to watch sensor data changing over time in a chart like the one below?
Accelerometer Graph
One way is to export data and then show it e.g. in Excel (which has been great chart functions). But even better, if this could be done directly with data provided from the target board? If you think this is hard to do, then I can show you how this can be done in a few steps with the help of a very nice tool: FreeMASTER 🙂
MCU on Eclipse 